The present invention relates to an automatic teller machine and more particularly to an automatic bill collecting method having the steps of detecting when the bill boxes for respective bill denominations installed in the machine are full, and automatically storing the bills contained in a full bill box into another bill box for collecting.
Automatic teller machines in use are designed to collect bills received into bill boxes, according to their respective bill denominations, after identifying their denominations and to draw the bills out of these bill boxes for payment.
When a bill box for a particular bill denomination becomes full, however, no more bills can be received. As a result, it is necessary for a predetermined number of collected bills to be transferred from the bill box into another one so as to provide room for the reception of new bills.
This process of collecting bills is accomplished by providing each bill box with a sensor for detecting its full condition. When a bill box is detected as being completely full, a predetermined number of bills are drawn out of this bill box and transferred into another one.
The aforementioned conventional bill collecting method presets the number of bills to be collected, so that the preset number of bills is automatically collected when the full condition of a bill box is detected.
The disadvantage of this method is that the operating efficiency may decrease, depending on the day-to-day operation of transactions, because the number of bills collected is fixed.
When the incoming amount is greater than the outgoing amount, for instance, the number of bill collecting times tends to increase if the number of collecting bills is preset rather small. Thus, performance of transactions is restricted to that extent.
When the outgoing amount is greater than the incoming amount, on the other hand, the residual amount of bills contained in the bill box, for a particular bill denomination, tends to quickly diminish if the number of collecting bills is preset rather large, thus resulting in the necessity of filling up the bill box for a bill denomination again. The performance of transactions is also restricted by the replenishing operation.